


the good old days, the honest man

by therm0dynamics



Series: everybody wants to rule the world [2]
Category: Narcos (TV)
Genre: (sorta) - Freeform, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, Friendship, Gen, Late Night Conversations, M/M, Mutual Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-11
Updated: 2017-11-11
Packaged: 2019-01-31 17:34:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12686979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/therm0dynamics/pseuds/therm0dynamics
Summary: “Is this Agent Steve Murphy, DEA?” says the voice on the other end of the line, an elusively familiar one with an equally elusive and familiar accent.“Yeah?” says Murphy, squinting ridiculously into the darkness, as if that would help him think any clearer. He really needs more sleep. More sleep, and less alcohol. “Who is this?”“It’s Sandoval.”“The fuck it is.”





	the good old days, the honest man

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this months ago for a friend and was finally persuaded to post it here. back by unpopular demand: my badly-edited and incredibly self-indulgent dissertation on what steve murphy was doing in season 3, starring the most underrated minor character from seasons 1 and 2. spoilers through 3x07 or so. title courtesy of the killers.

His phone rings at three in the morning, Miami time. 

It’s a good thing he’s practically become an insomniac, Murphy thinks, though whoever it was had a lot of fucking nerve bothering him this time of night. He’s about to decline the call before the shrilling cell phone wakes Connie or Olivia, but then he gets the thought that maybe it’s that dipshit confidential informant finally calling back with updates he’d expected days ago.

He snatches up the phone with an irritated sigh, scattering papers off a table piled high with sheaves of file folders, and strides outside in his undershirt and boxers to take the call.

“José Ocampo, you motherfucker,” he snaps, from the balcony of his apartment. The tepid, humid night air clings to his bare arms and legs. He’s sweating already. “Couldn’t call on Tuesday like I asked you to, but you got no problem waking me up at this time of night?”

Not that he’d been sleeping, but these CIs needed to know their place.

“Is this Agent Steve Murphy, DEA?” says the voice on the other end of the line, an elusive and familiar one with an equally elusive and familiar accent.

“Yeah?” says Murphy, squinting ridiculously into the darkness, as if that would help him think any clearer. He really needs more sleep. More sleep, and less alcohol. “Who is this?" 

“It’s Sandoval.”

“The fuck it is.”

“Eduardo Sandoval, the — ”

“Yeah, I remember who you are,” Murphy says. Like he could forget. But what the _fuck?_ He jams the bulky phone into the crook of his neck and shoulder, leans his elbows on the railing, and rests his head in his hands. He suddenly feels like he’s slipped into a weird, surreal dream. The world hanging frozen around him. “Why are you calling me?”

There’s a very long, very awkward pause on the other end from the ex-Vice Minister of Justice of the Republic of Colombia.

“Well?” Murphy says, into the silence that crackles lightly of static. “Wait, how did you even get my number?”

“I still have my contacts,” Sandoval says, a little reproachfully. He sounds _drunk_ , Murphy realizes. It’s two in the morning on a Wednesday, Bogotá time, and that no-fun stick-up-his-ass guy is _drunk._

“Your _contacts_ , yeah,” Murphy says, and then he jolts fully awake as a terrified, gaping pit opens in his chest. “Shit, is this about Jav — Agent Peña? Is he okay?”

“Agent Peña is fine,” Sandoval says slowly. Murphy lets out a long, measured breath and waits for his heart to stop pounding and his hands to stop shaking. Tries not to feel stupid and pathetic for how he’d reacted so strongly, jumped so immediately to an unfounded conclusion. “You have not talked to him recently?”

“No,” Murphy says, and something in him that he doesn’t want to examine too closely twists painfully at that. _Recently?_ No. He hadn’t spoken to Javier Peña since he’d left Colombia eight months, three weeks, six days ago.

All those long, frustrating months of grief and rage that you spend with someone. All those times you crossed point after point of no return, witnessed unforgivable atrocities, committed unspeakable acts of your own. Back-to-back, hand-in-hand, wading neck-deep across a river of blood, spiraling down and down through the heart of evil — and at the end of all that, radio silence. It would have made processing the aftermath of that monumental clusterfuck a lot easier for him, Murphy thinks, being able to talk it through with the one person alive who could understand what he’d been through, ‘cause he’d gone through it _together_ with Javier Peña, but no.

And Murphy gets it. He really, truly does. He knows the choices Peña had to make down in Colombia; he’d seen them firsthand. The compromises forced on him, the desperate gamble that blew up so badly in his face. And Murphy, above all, knows Javier Peña, knew him, admired him, maybe even — even more than that. Knows that the man had thrown himself back into that jungle-infested hell for a second chance, for repentance, for redemption. And if Murphy is one of the things that reminds Peña of his failure, of how low he’d been forced to sink — if he needs to be forgotten for Peña to get his closure _,_ then so be it. Murphy has made his peace with that.

Or at least, he thought he _had_ , until this ghost of his past surfaced again to collect-call him long-distance at an obscene hour of the night.

“Murphy?” Sandoval says, jolting him back to reality.

“What?” Murphy snarls. “You don't get to call me up like we're best friends, Sandoval. You hated my guts from the moment we met.” He scrubs a hand over his face. “I have work in four hours.”

He ends the call without a goodbye and storms back inside — but quietly, quietly, mindful of his sleeping wife and child.

\--

A few days pass, and Murphy makes slow, steady progress on the case he’s been assigned. There’s a new cocaine import outfit in town trying to prove themselves as most newcomers to the scene do: violently, gruesomely, spectacularly. If he’s awake at three in the morning to answer his phone again, it’s because he has things to do, he tells himself. Not because he’s tired of the dreams he’s been having lately, of jungle, and fog, and water, and the clinking of spent bullet casings on concrete. Not because he’s starting to dwell on it again, the faces of the dead lying in the streets of Bogotá, Cali, Medellín, Miami, it’s all one and the same.

“We may not have been friends,” Sandoval says, without preface, still not sounding entirely sober, “but I did not _hate_ you, Agent Murphy.”

Murphy snorts. “Right, which is why you looked like you wanted to cut my throat every time I so much as looked sideways at Gaviria.”

“It was my duty to protect him.”

“From what?” Murphy says bitterly. He takes a minute to imagine Sandoval slumped over a kitchen table somewhere in Bogotá, tipsy and disheveled, but has a hard time pulling that image into focus. He’d never so much as seen the man with his tie askew. Sandoval probably slept in a suit. “From good advice? Reasonable suggestions? Courses of action that would’ve maybe ended that whole shitshow months earlier — ” 

“From the cartels on one hand and you Americans on the other,” Sandoval snaps. “And the forty-five million people of Colombia in between, screaming for Gaviria’s head on a plate.” He scoffs. “I see the DEA has not changed. Always thinking you are the only ones that matter. You are not allowed to criticize when you couldn’t even stop your top agent from turning traitor and running to a death squad for help. ”

“ _Don’t_ call him a traitor,” Murphy snarls, a dark and ugly anger simmering under his skin. Only belatedly does he realize Sandoval’s offhanded insinuation that he was second-best to Peña, but that’s not even a point Murphy can argue, because he can’t be insulted by what is, essentially, the fucking _truth_. “You didn’t even realize the situation you put us in." 

“That _we —_!?” Sandoval lets out an unpleasant scraping bark of laughter. “No. You were not there with Gaviria, by his side every day, listening to him … _worry_ and _question_ and — no, _you_ should not pretend to understand the situation _we_ were in.”

“Oh, I see. Yeah, you didn’t hate me,” Murphy says, low and nasty and smirking. “You were _jealous_ of me. Jealous that Gaviria wanted to take my advice. Would want to talk to me, even. Because _you_ wanted to be the only one who could protect him. The only one he would trust and listen to.”

“Yes, the same as you wanted with Javier Peña, Agent Murphy,” Sandoval hisses, with something that sounds a hell of a lot like hatred in his voice, but also maybe despair. “But look what happened with him.”

Murphy is spared having to think of a comeback as Sandoval hangs up on him. Good fucking thing, too, he thinks with a creeping dismay. He can’t think of a single thing he could have said in response.

\-- 

Three days later, on a tip from Ocampo, who’d proven himself useful after all, Murphy intercepts a go-fast boat tearing into a residential marina with fifteen kilos of blow stashed in the hold. Arrests the crew and the skipper too, and convinces them to offer substantial information in exchange for leniency just as a cherry on top.

The maneuver was an amateur attempt at best, all flash and no strategy, nowhere on the level of the Colombian cartels. Still, an elated rush hits Murphy once all is said and done and he’s back home for the night, and he stands on his balcony, smoking and drinking in private celebration. Looking at the lights of Miami spread in front of him and feeling unstoppable, king of the city, king of the world.

But then he has a sudden recollection of the way Javier Peña used to look when they pulled off something daring like this, triumphant and determined, how loose and smiling he would be after several rounds of victory drinks — and goddamn, _goddamn_ , if that isn’t a hell of a come-down.

Murphy douses his cigarette in his half-finished drink and goes back inside to write up his report, replaying the operation over and over again in his head to refocus himself.

And then the phone rings. Sandoval. Recalling how the last conversation with the man went, Murphy braces himself for another argument.

“You should see the two they brought in to replace you, following Agent Peña around like dogs to their master,” Sandoval says. A bit too casually, Murphy thinks.

And then he thinks about Sandoval — the proud way he’d carried himself, the haughty set of his shoulders, his ever-scowling expression, his unflinching eyes — and understands this to be Sandoval’s way of apologizing. And then immediately feels like an asshole for being surprised by the gesture.

“What are their names?” Murphy asks, because if Sandoval can try and make nice, then he can too.

“Chris Feistl and Daniel Van Ness,” Sandoval supplies immediately. Murphy files those names away for thorough research, referencing, and cross-checking on the DEA database. Because corruption in Colombia runs deep and he’s rightly learned to be paranoid. Because there’s no such thing in this line of work as having too much information. He does not think for even a moment about what Sandoval said to him last time, and about the people he does and does not trust to watch Javier Peña’s back.

“And how are they?”

“Feistl and Van Ness,” Sandoval says, forming the unaccustomed English names deliberately. “They think Peña’s a hero.”

“And you don’t think so?”

“Nobody was a hero in any of this,” Sandoval says diplomatically, through gritted teeth, like he’s wary of steering the conversation down the same path as last time. Murphy feels a little more charitable toward him for that. “And Agent Peña knows better than anyone what he did.”

“And is he still — doing?”

“No,” Sandoval says, with some satisfaction. “It looks like he is, as you would say, _keeping his hands clean_.”

Which makes Murphy feel better, knowing that although Peña wants nothing to do with him anymore, that at least that severance is serving it’s purpose and that Peña is, for now, in no danger. And though it doesn’t make him feel _much_ better, Murphy’s long since learned to be grateful with what he’s given.

\--

“The DEA caught Gilberto Rodriguez today,” Sandoval informs him, the next time he calls.

“One down, three to go,” Murphy says, and firmly tamps down an unwanted rush of melancholy.

He’s doing just fine on his own. His investigations are going well. He’s more-than-adequately leading his own task force. He’s trusted enough by the higher-ups to basically do whatever he wants with impunity, given whatever resources he asks for, and worshipped by the entirety of the Miami-Dade county office as The Man Who Caught Escobar, but still —

But _nothing_ , he tells himself. He’s settled in Miami with his wife and kid and out of that waking nightmare that was Colombia. He got everything he wanted. To want more would be selfish. And selfishness is dangerous.

“As far as I know,” Sandoval continues, sounding _amused_ — which comes as a shock to Murphy, who’d only ever seen Sandoval express two emotions, angry irritation and irritated anger — “it involved a false raid, a car chase, and two poultry trucks.”

“I didn’t know _keeping his hands clean_ meant turning the operation into fuckin’ Looney Tunes,” Murphy mutters, and hears the reference go way over Sandoval’s head in the resulting silence. Then he sighs. “You don’t sound too happy about the arrest.”

“It is the right thing, yes, but not necessarily … a good thing,” Sandoval says. Doesn’t Murphy fucking know that fucking dilemma. How little things have changed down there. He listens carefully while Sandoval sketches out the current situation with the government, the cartel, the surrender, how everything now is precariously hanging by a few threads and a handful of promises. “The CIA attaché is not happy.”

“That creep, Bill Stechner?”

“Is that his name?” Sandoval says. Murphy chuckles. He doesn’t know what Sandoval is up to these days, doesn’t know what kind of work there is available for an ex-Vice Minister of Justice who’d left the game the way Sandoval left the game, but Murphy knows _full well_ that Sandoval knows Bill Stechner’s name.

“I hope Stechner can fucking live with being unhappy for the rest of this operation,” Murphy says. “Peña’s never going to listen to him.”

“He listens to nobody,” Sandoval says.

“Well that’s too bad,” Murphy says, and then adds, without knowing why, “it’s not my fight anymore.”

\--

“These two new DEA _gringos_ are doing very well,” Sandoval says, the next time he calls. “At least they can actually speak Spanish.”

“Hey, fuck you,” Murphy says. “I’ve got that Miami Spanglish down pretty good now. You wanna practice with me?”

“No, thank you,” Sandoval says.

“So, what have those two been up to?” It’s a genuine question — he’d been too busy in the past few weeks to keep up on the information coming out of Colombia, had worked well past midnight for the past four days running. This Miami assignment is _his_ personal atonement. Doing good, solid, aboveground work, seeing tangible results, making a concrete difference in a place where justice has a meaning. So he tells himself.

“The Cali cartel’s chief of security is their newest informant. They are very busy trying to keep him alive.”

“Damn,” Murphy says, impressed in spite of himself. It took balls of fucking steel to be a double agent, with Cali’s reputation for permanently disappearing those people who crossed them. “And who might that be?”

“Jorge Salcedo. He was, how do you say, a _fucking pain in the ass_ ,” Sandoval says, and Murphy snorts. But then Sandoval adds, meaningfully, “but he turned on the cartel, and he’s got a wife and two kids. So.” 

“Oh,” Murphy says, the grin fading from his face.

“Though like I said. I think these new agents know what they’re doing.”

Feistl and Van Ness. Murphy had checked their files the day after Sandoval had given him their names. They were both serious, upstanding agents and had distinguished themselves at Quantico, though they were also young and lacked field experience. 

He feels a strange sense of protectiveness toward those two men he doesn’t know and is likely to never meet. He fervently hopes Sandoval is right and that they know what they’re doing, because if either they slipped up or got caught, well. He knew what the consequences were. He knew the tacky slickness of blood on the ground, and the smell of bodies rotting in a ditch, and the sickening feeling of being seconds too late to help. The weight of bearing someone else’s death on your shoulders. Those were things that nobody should have to know. Those were things that stayed with you for life.

And at the back of Murphy’s mind, as he always seemed to be these days, is Javier Peña. Peña had gone down there to do things differently this time. And to have his agents fail him, to be forced into a corner like they’d been forced into last time, to need to act out of head-above-water desperation again — it doesn’t bear thinking about. 

\-- 

Weeks pass. Summer melts into fall. And Murphy can’t believe it. Can’t believe his life. Can’t believe he’s taking chunks out of the city’s cocaine smuggling infrastructure without the government pulling some underhanded shit behind his back, without his higher-ups actively stonewalling him at every turn, without his suspects walking out of jail scot-free. _Cannot._ Fucking. Believe. That Sandoval now calls him a few times a week just to bitch about life, about his job, about how hot and humid it was in Colombia (“Hate to break it to you, Sandoval, but you live in a fucking _tropical country_ ,” Murphy says testily, sweating his ass off in Miami) — and about the human disasters that comprise the Colombian DEA team.

Three days ago Sandoval witnessed Agent Feistl pouring two energy drinks into his coffee and drinking the whole thing in one go. On Tuesday alone, Van Ness ate nine _arepas_. Over the weekend, Peña’s irredeemably straight-laced assistant got drunk in a drag club and ended up on stage, which might have caused “an international incident, stop _laughing_ , Murphy.” Last week Peña himself went into Bill Steichner’s office while the man was in the field and zip-tied every one of his drawers shut. Feistl again, blasting Metallica in the office constantly and singing along, and Sandoval’s almost, maybe, perhaps starting to _enjoy_ it. Van Ness again, with freakish determination and ever-increasing accuracy, trying at least twice a day to launch a paper airplane into Feistl’s mug of coffee in retaliation.

“How do you _know_ all this?” Murphy asks.

It seems like the new administration took Sandoval back and put him closer to the action than ever — he’s on some kind of committee watchdogging the DEA, as he had _previous experience in the matter._ He’s in the same building as them, in an adjacent office, even. The implication is clear. He’s there to spy.

“But they have not said anything yet,” Sandoval says. “Maybe they have not even noticed they are being watched, since they are too busy with these, how do you call it, _prank wars_.”

Murphy smirks. If nobody on the DEA team had by now clocked a tall unsmiling blue-eyed and absurdly good-looking man always creeping around the bullpen like a nosy, disapproving parent, then Murphy would resign from the agency on the spot. Murphy would bet real money that they all had known what Sandoval was after from the very first day. It was more likely that none of them deemed him as a threat, and so chose to ignore him.

In return, he just tells Sandoval about Miami, the weather, the food, the task force he commands, practices Spanish on him with varied success, frets about the oncoming hurricane season, and rants about how movies make running on beaches seem so _romantic_ while in reality chasing a suspect for a mile in ankle-deep sand is an exhausting and chafing affair. He talks about Connie, newly transferred to Miami Medical, the city’s most prestigious hospital, and Olivia, now saying her first words. He talks about football and Sandoval pretends to care. Sandoval talks about _fútbol_ and Murphy doesn’t even bother.

He’s _friends_ with Sandoval now, Murphy thinks with some amazement, after he catches himself saying _look me up if you ever find yourself in Miami,_ and then decides it doesn’t really matter. Even if Sandoval is only looking for a way to bicker away the long early hours when he can’t sleep, fine. Murphy can’t blame him. He actually looks forward to the calls now. Listening to Sandoval talk on and on in his steady lilting accent, Murphy can almost imagine being back in Colombia — _back with Javier Peña_ , that traitor voice in his mind says before he can shut it up — and even that little bit is better than nothing.

\--

It’s two-thirty in the morning on some insignificant night. The phone rings.

“Two hours ago, Agent Peña, Don Berna, and Los Pepes just stormed a FARC compound in the jungle to rescue the wife of Cali’s top money launderer so that he would testify in court,” Sandoval says, calmly, like he’s reading off a weather report. “I thought you would want to know.”

“Jesus Christ,” Murphy hisses. He gets an immediate headache that has nothing to do with the bills of lading and cargo manifests he’d been trying to piece together for hours now into some shred of damning evidence. “When is the next flight down to Cali? I’m going to fucking kill him.”

“Who, Franklin Jurado?”

“Sure. Why the fuck not. Him too.”

He hangs up.

It appears he’s spoken too soon, because Sandoval calls him as soon as he gets to work that morning to tell him Franklin Jurado has been stabbed to death in federal custody. It’s strange to have Sandoval’s voice in his ear in broad daylight, but in that moment, all Murphy can think about is, no surprise, Javier Peña.

He feels betrayed, which is _stupid_ , because it wasn’t like Peña had made a promise not to go back to his old ways, that ends-justify-the-means mentality that’d gotten him kicked off the investigation in the first place. But behind that betrayal is real, genuine fear. Peña had taken a gamble once again, and once again came up with nothing. And who knew what promises he’d made this time, and to whom, and how they could all come back to bite him worse than what happened to him the first time — that is, if Peña was even still _alive_ when the consequences came back around.

That night, he lies wide awake beside Connie, seething. How could Peña be so careless. If only he could be down there with him. Maybe he could stop history repeating itself, maybe he could stop _Peña_ this time, and Peña would never have had to do what he did, would never have had to leave. Maybe the two of them could see the mission through together, like they were meant to. Murphy still remembers that goodbye hug at the airport, the clinking of two whiskey glasses, the smell of cigarette smoke, a hand on his arm, an arm around his shoulders, a constant solid warmth by his side, always there every time Murphy glanced backwards. God, why does this thing in him feel so much like _heartbreak_.

It’s not his fight anymore, he repeats to himself. It’s not. It’s not. One hand clutching his cell phone and the other clenched into the sheets so tightly that by morning, his entire body feels numb.

\-- 

The next time, about a week later, Murphy turns the tables and phones Sandoval. He’d traced the number the second time Sandoval had called him, but had never used it until now.

“Does he,” Murphy says, a fifth of whiskey into a long, long night, and feeling very juvenile and stupid, “ever say anything about me?”

“Ah, Murphy,” Sandoval sighs quietly, after an endless pause.

Well. There’s no more Murphy can say about that.

He wonders where Sandoval’s at, if there’s someone there with him, if he had a significant other, a family — he never recalled the man saying anything about either — and then thinks briefly about Gaviria, for some reason, and then drops it entirely. It’s so easy, in these absurd, surreal hours far past midnight and with nobody else around on either end, for Murphy to think of Sandoval as a disembodied voice unentangled with anyone else he used to know, unconnected to him, even, unrelated to this entire tangled bloody swath of shared history that they cannot, for the rest of their lives, distance themselves from.

“The first time you called,” Murphy says. “I asked you why. And you never answered me.”

“We have been talking for months now. Does it matter?” 

“God _damnit_ , Sandoval.”

“We had one thing in common from the start, Murphy,” Sandoval says, sounding very tired. “And that is that we regret it.”

No, Murphy thinks. That’s not true at all. Despite being some of the bleakest months of his life, despite changing him deeply and irrevocably, body and soul, he doesn’t _regret_ Colombia and the time he spent there. He even misses it at times. Not the death, or the corruption. Not the blundering around whispering prayers through his teeth, taking two steps forward and yet remaining three steps behind, hoping to catch the monster before the jungle darkness ate him alive. No, what he really misses is — is —

And like Sandoval is reading his mind, he says, “I do not mean we regret what was accomplished, or what we learned. But because we both failed, not the mission, but the people that we — that we cared for.”

“Yeah,” Murphy says. It’s all he can think to say, in the face of the truth, and he gives thanks to every higher power he believes in that Sandoval also can’t bring himself to say that crucial word, to make that confession, to face the reality of the situation. They’re both pathetic. So _fucking_ pathetic. 

There’s an interminable, impenetrable silence. Murphy wonders if Sandoval is just going to hang up on him and never call again. Murphy himself is tempted to do exactly that.

“He does.”

“Does what?”

“Talk about you. He never says your name, but he talks about you all the time.”

Murphy lets out a short, sharp breath and ends the call. And immediately redials.

“What does he say?” Murphy demands.

“That you file your paperwork better than Van Ness and Feistl do, and your handwriting is easier to read, and you could have caught this person days ago, and this coffee is so shit even you wouldn’t drink it, and back when you two worked together, this is what _my old partner_ would have done — ”

Murphy hangs up again. There’s an intolerable ache in his chest and a stinging in his eyes, and his hands are shaking. He gets Sandoval back on the line.

“International calls are not _free_ , you know,” Sandoval says, sounding so like his peeved stick-in-the-mud self that Murphy can’t help but let out a weak laugh. "Javier Peña has been miserable ever since he got here.”

“Does he talk to you?”

“No,” Sandoval says. “He knows what I am here to do.”

“Does he know we talk?”

“Of course not.”

“Well fucking thanks for _that,_ at least,” Murphy snaps, swiping the back of his free hand across his eyes. The part of him that isn’t bitter and heartsick is absolutely furious.

“He thinks you hate him,” Sandoval says. “That, because of what he did last time, you want nothing to do with him anymore. And he has convinced himself that he deserves it.”

That stops Murphy dead in the water.

“What?”

“He has talked to me only once. The very first day he got here. He said I might wonder where you were. He said you earned your right to leave, you are where you deserved to be, and he never called you because he does not wish to remind you of Colombia,” Sandoval says. “He says he doesn’t want to do that to you, not after what this place did to you. He thinks it would be cruel.”

“What the _fuck_ ,” Murphy says.

“I wanted to find out if that was true, that you hated him. That is why I called you, at first."

"You know I didn't," Murphy says. He could laugh. How could he ever, ever,  _ever_  hate Javier Peña? He is capable of a lot, had found out exactly what number and kind of terrifying acts he was willing to commit down in Colombia, but hating that man is something he doesn't think he has the ability to even _fathom_. "And you still kept calling anyway."

"Well, you _gringos_ aren’t so annoying when you are two thousand miles away.”

“Yeah, thanks, I guess,” Murphy says, unsure, as he always somehow is with Sandoval, whether to feel offended or complimented. “And you’re telling me all this _now_ because?”

“Because they are close to the end now, and it has not been easy on him,” Sandoval says, serious again. “I think that when Agent Peña leaves Colombia this time, he will not return.”

“Oh.”

“It was always going to be impossible for me to have closure. I have made peace with that,” Sandoval says, and Murphy feels an incredible rush of sympathy for him. “But I would not wish it on Javier Peña.”

He gives Murphy a phone number.

“Thanks,” Murphy says. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Night.”

“ _Buenas noches_.”

Murphy hangs up and looks at his phone for a long time. He and Sandoval had more in common than just regret. They both also had, long ago and at a great cost, earned their right to be selfish, to want more. Earned it with the blood of thousands on their hands. But only one of them had the chance to redeem that sacrifice, and finally Murphy dials the new sequence of numbers. It’s three in the morning, Cali time, but he knows, with an unshakable conviction, that Javier Peña will be awake to take his call. 

“Agent Peña, DEA,” says the irritable, sleep-deprived, voice on the other line, amidst a soft fluttering of papers and the clattering of ice in a glass. Murphy closes his eyes and lets the familiarity of it wash over him like the light and warmth of dawn after a dark, cold night.

“Hey, Javi,” he says, beginning to smile. “How’ve you been?”

**Author's Note:**

> don't look at me, idk. the usual apologies to history, grammar, and narrative, and i hope someone found this amusing, at least. please let me know what you think!


End file.
